<p>By the time your personal data has been compromised — like it was for almost 150 million Americans who had Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, birth dates and addresses exposed in the Equifax hack — you’ve already missed your best opportunity to protect yourself. And the vast majority of credit monitoring services don’t really provide you with protection where you’re most vulnerable. They also can get you a false sense of security.</p>

<p>The Levi’s initiative — “Improving Worker Well-Being,” officially — is about getting an industry to recognize that workers aren’t faceless cogs in giant profit machines, but people with feelings and needs. “This is about creating a culture that embraces well-being,” says Kim Almeida, who heads the program. “It’s a mindset shift.”</p>

<p>In a year of big stories, the opioid crisis has become one of the biggest, though it’s been a problem since the early 2000s. Around then, people in Kentucky, West Virginia, and southeast Ohio started referring to Percocet, OxyContin, and Vicodin as “hillbilly heroin.” The pills were easy to get and easy to abuse. Between those, and heroin and synthetics like fentanyl — which many have since moved on to — West Virginia in 2015 had the highest overdose mortality rate in the nation, with 41.5 deaths per 100,000.</p>